Parenting & Family Quote by Charles Lamb

Credulity usually lands as an insult: gullibility, the mark of someone being played. Lamb flips it into a moral X-ray. In an adult, credulity is a weakness because it’s passive trust without the willingness to test, revise, or take responsibility for one’s beliefs. It’s the posture of the consumer, not the thinker. For a critic like Lamb, that’s damning: the grown mind has the tools to discriminate, and refusing to use them is less innocence than negligence.

But in a child, credulity becomes a strength because it’s the engine of learning and attachment. The child’s readiness to believe is how stories take root, how language acquires meaning, how social bonds form before skepticism turns every promise into a contract. Lamb’s subtext isn’t that children are smarter; it’s that they are more evolutionarily and emotionally fit for their task. Their job is to absorb the world, not audit it.

The line also carries Romantic-era pressure in the background: early 19th-century Britain was modernizing fast, elevating reason, utility, and adult seriousness. Lamb, writing in a culture that prized “sense,” smuggles in a defense of wonder as something more than sentimentality. The sting is aimed at grown-ups who congratulate themselves on being “realists” while being credulous in more dangerous ways: in power, in fashion, in received opinion. Childlike belief is provisional and imaginative; adult credulity often disguises itself as certainty.